


Interstices

by RarePairFairy



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Attempted Kidnapping, Blood and Injury, Crowley and Aziraphale Move To Tadfield Fic, Cuddling & Snuggling, Domesticity, Established Relationship, Family Feels, Implied Mpreg, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Introspection, Just Guys Bein Dads, Kidfic, Light Angst, M/M, Minor Violence, Sad Crowley (Good Omens), Tags Are Hard, post-notpocalypse, snake n bake, what the fuck are fucken feelings yo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-05-16 11:11:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19317010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RarePairFairy/pseuds/RarePairFairy
Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale, following the Little Apocalypse that Couldn't, and the baby they didn't plan to have.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I love big dramatic declarations of love but I also love the quiet scenes, denouements and subtle character development where you get to see people exist together. Stylistically that's the goal with this fic.
> 
> 27th July update: LOL now there's a plot, whoops

Her fathers agreed: Hazel’s laugh was both her best and worst feature.

It was fine when she was mildly amused as opposed to hysterical, but being an infant, her emotions could bounce from one end of the spectrum to the other in the blink of an eye. Her expressions had just begun to indicate emotions beyond “I have soiled myself” and her fine red hair had grown in enough to be gathered at the top of her head in a baby scrunchie, giving her the appearance of a volcano atop a potato. Which, frankly, suited her personality to a tee.

 _Most_ of the time, she had that lovely effervescent gurgle-burble that so instantly endears a baby even to people who profess not to like babies, which is how she befriended Adam, despite being unable to walk or talk or participate in games. Or stop making grabby hands at Dog’s ears.

It was when she was riotously happy that her laugh became a problem. The unadulterated joy glowing out of her scrunched pink face had become a kind of warning that out of that small body, an impossibly large noise was about to erupt and God save anybody within earshot. It was a terrible high-pitched shriek, like whirring-bladed machinery, a screaming laugh that could have manifested from the collective pain of all the souls in hell.

It was the right sort of laugh to convince any doubter that Hazel was a demon’s daughter. The kind of laugh only a father could love.

And they did, both of them. Her laugh was demonic, her tastes fussy, her moods swinging more aggressively than her father in the 60s. But every hard-won smile, every muffled clap of little starfish hands clumsily smacking together with glee, every moment standing over the crib and staring at her faint eyelashes and round cheeks, every moment since her birth had been a waking dream.

She was a study in contrasts, a product of opposites meeting and creating something that neither had thought possible (their genuine reason for the shotgun wedding – according to the angelic partner, there’s no such thing as “too fast” when your child is about to be born a bastard. And after all, allowing for a generous interpretation, they _had_ been courting for a long time).

She was delightfully _child_ like, and neither of them had ever been children. She was an adventure they had embarked upon entirely unprepared and with no idea what to expect. Would she have wings? If she did, they had yet to appear. Would she be sensitive to hellfire and holy water, or immune to both? It was safe only to hypothesize.

For the moment, small and round and clad in a pastel yellow size 0 dinosaur onesie, she seemed so awfully earthly. Aside from her periwinkle blue eyes, which seemed on occasion to shimmer like distant starlight. Or her laugh, of course.

She had been born of an angel and a demon, but she had been born on earth, and was the very first of her kind. Perhaps, they hoped, they dreaded, she would turn out to be exactly what she seemed to be to those who did not know better:

a human child.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This fic is probably not going to have a consecutive timeline. Some of the ideas i'm workshopping take place before Hazel is born and some when she's a toddler.
> 
> Why is the baby called Hazel? I don't know. Naming her after a plant was probably Crowley's idea.

‘Well, Athena was born out of Zeus’s forehead.’

Aziraphale struggled to think of something to say. After a full minute, he managed to squeak a breathy ‘that’s fascinating’.

After having his question about how Hazel was born tactfully skirted for the fiftieth time, Adam decided to guess at the angel from down the road until he landed on the right answer. He would have just asked the other one, but something told Adam he’d actually get an answer, and that wasn’t as much fun. He took a bite from the lemon slice Aziraphale had brought out for him.

‘Yeah. According to the latest edition of the New Aquarian – did I tell you Anathema got me a subscription for my birthday? My parents wouldn’t pay for it – in the Throwback Thursday segment they were talking about Athena, and how she came right out of Zeus’s forehead after he ate her mother. She was even wearing armor and holding a spear, and instead of baby crying she did a war cry.’

Aziraphale blinked once, slowly, then raised his tea to his lips with a stalling hum. On the blanket in the middle of the room, Hazel stacked blocks on the reclining Dog’s back and cooed.

‘Well. That’s … interesting, Adam. Only clearly I didn’t eat Crowley …’ he launched a livid glare out at the window at his husband, who heard the end of his sentence and tossed a Very Inappropriate And Suggestive wink over his shoulder where he was working at the flowerbed, ‘and Hazel was certainly not born from my forehead. Though she does have a very impressive war cry.’

‘She does! She could be a banshee,’ Adam said, with enthusiasm that would have earned banishment from the house if it were anyone else saying it. Adam’s favourite thing about Hazel was the possibility of her turning into an eldritch horror, and neither Crowley or Aziraphale could fault him for it, considering.

‘Banshees are supposed to have red hair, and they’re sent by fairies to be harbingers of doom.’ He pronounced “harbingers” like _harr-binger_ , with a soft _ng_ like he was talking about a toy that makes a dinging noise.

Aziraphale, straining his niceness with effort he hadn’t made since before getting kicked out of the Superficially Nice People club of heaven, smiled a patient smile.

‘Ah. Well, she wasn’t sent by fairies either. And I rather think, not that I’m biased of course, that she is rather the opposite of a harbinger of doom.’ He tried not to (correctly) pronounce “harbinger” too conspicuously. It was never clear what exactly might embarrass a twelve-year-old.

‘She could be a nice banshee,’ Adam assented. ‘Maybe she announces good things. Like Pancake Thursday.’

‘What do you think of that, pumpkin?’ Crowley said, emerging at the window and propping his chin on his crossed arms. His hands hung casually so as to smudge the windowsill with his dirty garden gloves. Once a demon, always a bit of a grot. He directed his pet name across the room at his baby, who had not yet realized she was the center of attention. ‘Howling announcer of sweets. Suits her.’

‘Yes, well,’ Aziraphale said, fretting over the growing pile of blocks, under which half of Dog was still visible. ‘I always thought we should give her a fighting chance at growing teeth before we let her ruin them with too much sugar.’

Crowley, privately agreeing with Aziraphale and hoping that Hazel grew proper dangerous chompers, nonetheless shared an exasperated look with Adam. There was something to be said for retaining a rapport with mischievous adolescents.

‘Well anyway, if she didn’t come out of your head and she wasn’t brought by fairies, and she didn’t sprout from the garden or appear in a lake, then there’s obviously only one place she could have come from,’ Adam said matter-of-factly. Aziraphale’s eyebrows rose in dread.

‘And where is that?’ Crowley asked in amused anticipation.

‘The stork brought her.’

There was a pause, broken by the sound of a stack of blocks falling off a dog and the confused and disappointed whine of an infant.

Adam’s expression was entirely neutral. Crowley was profoundly impressed. Either Adam was an idiot, which he wasn’t, or he was more deadpan than Jane Austen, and Jane Austen was dead _and_ pan.

‘Well … yes!’ Aziraphale said, grabbing the lifeline and sprinting. ‘Naturally. The stork. You clever boy.’

He left his unfinished tea and hurried over to attend to his dog-licked child before Adam could say another word.

Crowley slowly turned to face Adam. Adam turned to face Crowley, looking as innocent as an ex-Antichrist.

‘How long will the mercy last?’ Crowley asked.

Adam shrugged, and polished off the last of his lemon slice. ‘He gave me cake. I don’t want to be too mean.’


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How they found out.
> 
> I wrote this in about 2 hours late at night after getting back from work and I fully plan to go back and edit it later, so if you spot anything that needs fixing (typo, grammar, word repetition, passive voice, eh) please feel free to leave a comment and I'll get on it.

Aziraphale never used to be big on poetry. It was one of humankind’s artistic endeavors that he observed from a distance and with polite interest. He could acknowledge the historical significance of the form. He liked the occasional sonnet, but in the same way he liked one of the songs in The Sound of Music.

In the bookshop he had the war poets, and Wordsworth and Auden, of course. He even carried Plath, Marquis and the Mersey Sound, which by his standards were all terribly contemporary. But of the few books he would willingly part with, in a singular reversal of the typical stock movements of a London bookstore, the bulk of all his actual sales were from the poetry section.

The few moments in which he had felt inspired by the genre was due more to the moment than the piece itself. Laying, for instance, with his head in Crowley’s lap. The sky beyond the window was a deep grey and streetlight shimmered through the droplets on the glass as they rolled lazily downward to gather on the lip of the red mullion. There was a cup of Irish coffee resting on his chest, one finger crooked loosely in the handle, as he dozed and listened to his partner uncharacteristically _read_.

“Partner”. There was a poetry in that word, now that it applied to them. Armageddon had destroyed one thing successfully, and that was the stringent holy convention that had so effectively stood between an angel and a demon for six thousand years. Obliterated was the law, the invisible barrier between something as simple and breathtaking as this; Crowley’s warm thigh, under Aziraphale’s bare neck.

‘Why do you even have this? It’s not a first edition,’ Crowley said, flicking idly through the Housman that had been sitting on the coffee table by the sofa. ‘And it’s a paperback.’

His voice was slightly sticky with wine. They’d started early in the afternoon, for no special occasion other than that they and the world were all intact, and it was soon enough after the Ritz and all that had come before (and after) and living was still a novel experience.

Without opening his eyes, Aziraphale drew on his infallible memory.

‘I to my perils of cheat and charmer came clad in armor by stars benign. Hope lies to mortals, and most believe her, but man’s deceiver was never mine.’

He felt Crowley’s leg shift.

‘The thoughts of others were light and fleeting, of lover’s meeting, or luck, or fame. Mine were of trouble, and mine were steady, so I was ready when trouble came.’

There was a beat filled only by the muffled sound of weather and footsteps on the path outside. Aziraphale opened one eye. Crowley had fixed him with a sphinxlike stare. Aziraphale had used to think it was guardedness. Now he thought he knew better. Crowley dedicated a flattering amount of attention to thinking about Aziraphale, sometimes in the middle of their conversations.

‘I chanced upon it in a volume of essays about pastoral poets. Not that he was a pastoral poet, mind you. A careless mischaracterization. I acquired that volume during the downsizing of a public library. Very emotional poetry, not quite what you would call typical of the period.’

‘Emotional,’ Crowley echoed, with a wry twist of his lips. Aziraphale transferred his cup to his other hand and tweaked Crowley’s bony knee.

‘This was sometime in the 70s, I do believe. We hadn’t spoken to each other since that meeting in Soho. Since the, ah … the thermos. I was trying not to reach out to you. That poem, reading it, it reminded me of you so strongly. I suppose I missed you.’

Crowley hummed. His fingers gently scratched at the back of Aziraphale’s head like the kneading of a cat’s paw.

He had been reciting lines at random from A Shropshire Lad, mostly to tease, but in the way his golden eyes now moved unhurriedly over the page Aziraphale sensed a seriousness. Crowley did not take books Seriously. That was Aziraphale’s territory. Even holding it as he did, in one hand, aggravating the already unevenly-worn binding, Crowley was absorbing himself. As if he were trying to find the Aziraphale of nearly fifty years past in the yellowed pages.

Caught up in a sudden mood, Aziraphale placed his empty cup on the floor by the couch.

‘Read to me?’

Crowley glanced down, and flipped back the page he had just turned.

 

‘Say, lad, have you things to do?

Quick then, while your day’s at prime.

Quick, and if ‘tis work for two,

Here I am, man, now’s your time.

 

Send me now, and I shall go;

Call me, I shall hear you call;

Use me ere they lay me low

Where a man’s no use at all;

 

Ere the wholesome flesh decay,

And the willing nerve be numb,

And the lips lack breath to say,

‘No, my lad, I cannot come.’

 

Crowley’s glass of whiskey, ice long since dissolved, joined Aziraphale’s cup on the floor.

As he leaned down, Aziraphale watched his long neck extend, his jawline move beneath the skin like a river moving over a rock. He inhaled the smell of cotton (shirt), the soft tang of salt (sweat), the faint whiskey aroma of Crowley’s breath. He wondered, terrified, what he would be now if Crowley _had_ been laid low.

‘I can feel you thinking bad thoughts,’ Crowley murmured, and rearranged his limbs to lie pressed against the angel on the suddenly slightly wider couch cushions.

‘It’s all so fleeting,’ Aziraphale whispered. Close, their noses touching, sharing air and heat.

‘Should I have read you a different one?’

‘No. I think I’ve just been waiting too long for the world to end. I’m not quite over it yet. The tension.’

Crowley looked briefly like he understood. Then he tilted his head up and smooched the tip of Aziraphale’s nose. Inched down, and drew Aziraphale’s top lip between his own, and held it for a moment in a tender kiss. Inched down further, and worried Aziraphale’s bottom lip between his teeth.

‘It’s no use distracting me,’ Aziraphale murmured into Crowley’s mouth. ‘I’m thoroughly distraught. Inconsolable.’

‘Clearly,’ Crowley said, licking the shell of Aziraphale’s ear.

‘I might fling myself from the top of the building in a fit of tearful hysteria.’

‘Mmm.’

‘And then _you’d_ have to run the shop.’

‘Don’t kill the mood,’ Crowley said, or rather, mouthed into the fluttering pulse of Aziraphale’s throat.

He ran his hand down the front of Aziraphale’s waistcoat, the buttons undoing themselves in the wake of his insistent fingers, until he stopped. The heel of his hand barely pressed against the waistline of Aziraphale’s trousers. Quickly, Crowley tugged free the hem of Aziraphale’s shirt.

Aziraphale was about to say something pointed about buttons until he caught the expression on Crowley’s face. He felt, rather than watched, Crowley’s fingers slide slowly up beneath his undershirt to rest against the skin of his belly.

They lay still for a moment, watching with unseeing eyes, communicating something new and strange through their skin. Something had come awake.

They were not strangers to sensuality, but lust for its own frivolous joyous sake was still new, and for a moment they wondered if this was like that, simply another unfamiliar and wonderful sensation. But while it was new, and unfamiliar and wonderful, it was not lust. It was something innocent and unaware, separate from them both but joined at the very roots. A sprout.

‘What is that?’ Crowley asked. Aziraphale stuttered. ‘I think … my dear boy. I’m not sure.’

‘ _How_ is that?’ Crowley asked. _Good_ , Aziraphale thought lightheadedly. _We’re on the same page, then._

‘It’s impossible,’ he said. His voice wavered. Crowley scrambled to sit up and straddle Aziraphale’s legs, and clumsily pawed Aziraphale’s clothes apart so that he could lay both hands on his angel’s torso. Aziraphale giggled briefly, unsure and maybe very slightly panicked.

Crowley’s widened eyes, a question mark of an expression, was somehow comforting. He prodded, stroked, smoothed his hands down the pale skin before him, unsure and somehow urgent like a man searching for the lump of a lost phone through a bedsheet, and Aziraphale was relieved. If he was a mess and Crowley was perfectly unruffled, he thought giddily, now _that_ would be a problem.

‘It’s possible,’ Crowley said, with stumped certainty. ‘I don’t know how, but it is. Someone’s in there.’

Aziraphale barked a feverish laugh and rapidly covered his mouth to stifle it. Their eyes met, mystified. Crowley slid one hand up Aziraphale’s chest until it rested over his pounding heart. The other remained, firm but not pressing, on his abdomen. The area just beneath the stomach he technically shouldn’t have, for the food it wasn’t necessary for him to eat. The area where he _knew_ he hadn’t manifested a womb.

But it wasn’t as if it had ever come up in casual conversation, he thought manically, whether or not angels needed wombs to create new life. Perhaps angels, like programs or long books or entire species, were also full of loose ends – bits of code, of plot, of evolutionary byproduct that had not been fully pursued but nonetheless remained forgotten in the finished product, to be stumbled upon on just such an occasion as this, activated by a chance sequence of events.

He was pregnant.

Crowley lifted his hand, fingers still splayed, from Aziraphale’s skin.

‘This has never happened before.’

Not a question.

He pulled Aziraphale’s shirt back down like an afterthought, or, no – with reverence. He did not redo the buttons on his shirt or pants.

‘What do we do?’ Aziraphale asked. He had not expected to feel so lost and helpless again so soon. He had been looking forward to a stretch of secure comfort, of being a bookstore proprietor, a lover, a confident person. This rude awakening, an exposure of the parody of him playing house. Perhaps God was playing a joke.

Crowley stared into the middle distance, as perfectly still as a snake on a rock. The only indication that any part of him was active was the rapid narrowing and dilation of his pupils, almost wide enough to eclipse his yellow irises, then narrow as a pin. Then, his mind apparently made up, Crowley swooped down.

Aziraphale gasped, then relaxed. Crowley lifted the glass and the cup from the floor by the couch.

‘I don’t know, and neither do you, what we’re doing,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘So until we figure it out, we should probably treat this like a normal pregnancy.’

‘Normal??’ Aziraphale repeated, thunderstruck. ‘Nothing about this is normal!’

‘Yes, panic, good idea,’ Crowley said, and Aziraphale would have been furious if his beloved thoughtless demon didn’t look like he literally meant it. ‘Get it out of your system. You’re the clever one so you’ll need a clear head if we’re going to approach this with any kind of intelligence.’

Aziraphale watched Crowley dispose of the remainder of their drinks in the little kitchenette in the corner of his back room.

‘Wait … are you suggesting …’

‘No alcohol. I think caffeine is out too, so no more black tea by the bucket. And that fantasy you had about how Tadfield seems like such a nice place to settle down …’

‘Crowley,’ Aziraphale wheezed.

‘They know where we are, here,’ Crowley said, kneeling before Aziraphale and taking his face in both hands. ‘The cottage you were looking at? Still available. I pulled a string or five, just in case you were serious,’ he said at Aziraphale’s watery gaze. ‘We’d have space out there. A place they don’t necessarily know about. No such thing as a secret, but the town’s still out-of-the-way, metaphysically speaking. We could protect a place like that. We’d have time, if nothing else.’

‘Shhhh,’ Aziraphale hushed, damming Crowley’s flow of speech, laying his thumb over Crowley’s lips. ‘You don’t have to convince me.’

The paperback Housman lay face-down on the floor, where Aziraphale hadn’t seen it fall. He leaned down to pick it up. He took a deep breath, and pulled Crowley in until his head lay against Aziraphale’s shoulder.

‘I’ll have to temporarily close the shop,’ he said wistfully, looking around at the titles. ‘Or, goodness forbid, _hire_ someone.’

‘There’s still plenty time to think about what to do, assuming this takes nine months,’ Crowley said into Aziraphale’s loosened collar. Aziraphale huffed faintly. Trust Crowley to think of nine months as plenty of time. ‘My stuff could be done in one trip.’

‘Oh, dear, your apartment,’ Aziraphale said, feeling slightly selfish. It hadn’t even crossed his mind that Crowley would be leaving something behind too. But Crowley shrugged.

‘Just a place to keep my plants, really. The ones that don’t disappoint me can all be transplanted into a garden easily enough.’

Before his mind’s eye, the image of Eden arose unbidden. They had met, there. A garden.

It suddenly seemed a little more appropriate, and a little less frightening.

‘You could grow fruit trees,’ he said teasingly.

Crowley drew back just enough to look at Aziraphale, and his face split into a genuine grin.

‘A whole orchard of apple trees,’ he purred. Aziraphale scoffed. The shock and momentary fear had dissolved, and in its place was a suffusing warmth, something like excitement.

‘Perhaps fruit would be a bit on the nose, after all,’ he said, and littered kisses all over Crowley’s face. ‘Perhaps you could grow something deciduous. Almonds. Or hazelnuts.’

Crowley silenced him with a deep, searching kiss.

Something in the new world was shifting. There would be no Agnes Nutters this time around, Aziraphale suspected. They were going in blind. Whoever, if anyone, had made plans beyond the apocalypse, she certainly wasn’t sharing them.

Ineffable. Maybe God herself didn’t know what was going to happen next, and was simply playing cards to see what happened.

It wouldn’t be entirely unlike her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell I have Feelings about poetry


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley gets insecure. Aziraphale is adjusting. A conversation at midnight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same deal as last time. Bashed this out in one sitting, there may be errors, feel free to provide feedback in the comments.

‘What if she’s like me?’

The night was never this silent in London. Aziraphale had had to adjust to things before, one couldn’t live six thousand years and not experience some upheavals. What got him was the sheer volume of changes in such a short space, all taking place within a structure that itself had transformed, all on the heels of two-and-a-half centuries spent comfortably in the one little corner he’d spent decades wearing in. So long sitting in an armchair at night with a folio, reading through the night to the sounds of London lurching and singing and yelling and getting drunk and going home and waking up and doing it all over again. So long living alone.

He used to think living in the same city was too close. Now look at the pair of them.

He still sat in his armchair at night and read, because leaving his entire book collection in the city while he left for the countryside felt far too much like abandonment. But living with a demon meant conceding a few learned vices, and every other night now found him laying in a bed in various states of undress and physical proximity with a _fiancé_ of all things.

All these things meant originally for humans. Food and literature were a slippery slope indeed. Next thing he knew it was autonomy and physical desire and marriage. And complicated conversations about emotions and hypotheticals.

“What if she’s like me”, indeed. Some variation of this idea had arisen in lighter conversations, but never sternly or in this doubtful tone.

They knew at least it was a “she”. Aziraphale’s body was warping in a way he was pretty sure it wasn’t designed to do, but he often found himself occasionally granted insights, like a person learning to read with their fingers.  What shape she bore remained to be seen, but her soul had the particular citrus-and-saffron glow of the feminine.

Crowley’s face did not lift from Aziraphale’s chest. Aziraphale felt the movement of his jaw and placed his hand upon it, and gently stroked the cheekbone beneath his thumb. The role of the comforter, another new thing. He had wasted forever discouraging Crowley and nudging him away. This change he purely enjoyed. It appealed to his nature to be free to embrace, indeed, to covet with fierce affection.

‘I am rather hoping she will be,’ he said.

‘I’m serious,’ Crowley said, tilting his face up and away from idle hands. Aziraphale tucked his chin into his collarbone to met Crowley’s gaze.

‘My dear, I’m not sure what exactly it is you’re worried about,’ he said. Crowley lowered his face. His breath gusted across Aziraphale’s bare chest.

‘You’re carrying a demon,’ he said. Aziraphale took a few deep breaths. It was a conversation he hoped they wouldn’t need to have.

‘I’m carrying a baby,’ he said, with all the firmness he could scrape together. ‘She will be a little like us both, as a matter of course. I only hope our quality of guidance has improved since Warlock.’

‘This won’t be like Warlock,’ Crowley said. The warmth of his torso left Aziraphale’s side as he leaned up and propped himself on one arm. Aziraphale lost track of what he was saying briefly. Crowley always looked so charmingly innocent when he rose from bed, with his normally well-tended hair a bird’s nest and his sharp face so openly vulnerable. He looked almost human, anodyne, except for his eyes glowing faintly in the weak moonlight.

‘This is … there’s an ocean of difference between humans creating something and a demon and an angel creating something. Something it wasn’t God’s idea to create.’

Aziraphale wondered how long this crisis had been haunting him. He sat up and took both of Crowley’s hands in his as if he might surreptitiously feel how deep the fear had pierced him.

‘If my getting pregnant wasn’t God’s idea, then she can’t have thought it terribly important to prevent. And if it _was_ God’s idea for me to get pregnant, then the universe is spinning on just as we hoped it would. Either way, there is no way to know what she thinks. Dwelling on it will achieve nothing but to keep us awake. And surely there are much nicer ways to stay awake on a balmy night like this.’

Crowley scoffed helplessly, looking lost.

‘I’m _serious_ ,’ he repeated weakly. ‘What if … what if she …’

Aziraphale lay back and beckoned Crowley to follow, which after a tortured moment he did. Between Crowley’s hair tickling Aziraphale’s chin and his leg draped over Aziraphale’s legs, Aziraphale felt encompassed. Crowley’s arm covered his chest, his hand on the pillow by Aziraphale’s head as if he might need to turn his head in the night for a kiss.

Held like something precious, like one of the scarce few things upon the material plane that Crowley felt it imperative to keep.

‘What if she’s like you?’ Aziraphale finished.

The nights were never this silent in London. In the past, in those treasured disgraceful secret  fantasies where he had caught himself wondering what it might be like to share time with Crowley, _all_ of time, and not just illicit snatched moments, he had never thought they would spend so much time just being quiet.

‘I’ve been suspecting lately that destroying the earth was never God’s own objective, quite so much as setting up dominoes. I daresay she gave us to each other from the outset when she placed us side by side. Or, alternatively, she did not, in which case we have chosen one another despite not only heaven and hell, but God herself.’

Crowley stiffened. The silence took on the character of waiting for something, the chasm between the lighting and the peal of thunder. Waiting for Aziraphale to fall. It had taken so little blasphemy from him, comparatively, to be cast out.

But if Aziraphale was to fall, it seemed, it wouldn’t be for this either.

‘I can only hope she has a heart like yours,’ Aziraphale said, with the cliff’s edge moment passed. ‘You called me clever once. I hope you will trust me then when I say your strength gives me hope for her.’

Crowley’s fingers were suddenly digging into the flesh of Aziraphale’s hip. Aziraphale turned so they were facing each other and watched Crowley kiss him with his eyes open.

‘I’m not strong,’ Crowley hissed indistinctly into the kiss. ‘I keep imagining what might happen if I lose you. It’s killing me. It killed me before we had anything to lose, and now …’

‘Then stop imagining,’ Aziraphale said, before Crowley bit his tongue. ‘ _Ow_. I’m right here. We can deal with the crisis when the crisis comes, but for now we’ve done all we can. Now roll over you terrible nuisance, I want to be the big spoon.’

With alarming obedience, Crowley turned and took Aziraphale’s wrist to wrap it around his middle. He curled and scooted back to maximize the contact between them, right down to tucking his feet between Aziraphale’s feet, which he knew for a fact Aziraphale wouldn’t normally permit what with Crowley’s feet always being so cold, but at least he was wearing the socks Aziraphale bought him as a moving-in present.

With his back to the moon and his body comfortably snuggled against his fiancé’s body (his _fiancé_ , goodness), Aziraphale could not help but feel the conversation was not over. Not really. Scars that deep did not heal overnight.

He wondered what, indeed, their daughter would look like. It was easier to imagine her, he found, if he imagined her in Crowley’s arms. He wondered if she might have his eyes. No, not his eyes – a baby forever wearing sunglasses? – with his _hair_. Dark red, like maple leaves or fine merlot. Like the chat noir dahlias Crowley had shown him when they were browsing for additions to the garden. What was the other one Crowley had shown him? Burgundy shadow dahlias.

Maybe they could call her Dahlia. But Crowley had put a moratorium on flower names after Lily, Rose, Daisy, Iris and Violet were suggested consecutively.

That was how he fell asleep, in the end, how he had found it easiest to fall asleep since his belly started to grow. He let his imagination carry him through a montage of possibilities of chubby roly poly babies and small round quiet infants, red-haired babies, white-haired babies with yellow eyes, or perhaps her eyes would be somewhere in the middle of theirs … perhaps hazel.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More-rampant-than-usual abuse of italics.
> 
> This chapter is going to lead into the next, which will also pull some themes from the previous chapter. This fic wasn’t meant to be sequential at all but I GUESS plans are for optimists.

Of _course_ she liked magic tricks.

She liked a lot of unsurprising things. Anything spooky (big spooky fan), to the point that Crowley was dreading the day he had to explain to her that Halloween was an American thing. Warm cosy sunlight. Storytime. Plants.

But magic especially. The best thing to cheer her up, no matter how arbitrarily miserable she was about swans existing or sand being sandy or daytime being over, was Aziraphale making a coin disappear. The next best thing was when he made it reappear.

Crowley suggested that she was the perfect audience, being the kind that didn’t know what was going on to begin with, but behind that veneer of obligatory sarcasm was a glow of sincere fondness. For an angel who broadly disliked children, Aziraphale was an enthusiastic and devoted parent. Surely it helped that Hazel was an enthusiastic and devoted audience (and of course that he had personally gestated her for eight and a half months in some mysterious internal morass of celestial viscera, but that was neither here nor there). He even, for the first time, invested the effort to learn some _new_ tricks. All hark-backs to the classics, of course, because nothing short of a second Armageddon was going to get Aziraphale to try a David Copperfield routine. But Hazel had her firm favourites, and they all happened to be tricks he learned from Maskelyne. In Hazel’s desire to see the same four tricks over and over and over and over and over and over and over, and Aziraphale’s “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude, there was a harmony even Crowley was loath to disrupt.

There was just one thing. A little twinge. A strange and subtle disquiet, maybe petty, probably unimportant, just that Crowley did not really have a “magic tricks”. It was a _them_ thing. He didn’t begrudge anything exactly; he just didn’t have a counterpoint. He provided the lush garden, which was one of Hazel’s favourite places to be, but that wasn’t quite the same.

Aziraphale did not take it too seriously. Naturally, no family loves in perfect parallel. They performed equal labour and that was ultimately what mattered. It all seemed perfectly sensible to Aziraphale. He waited with anticipation for the day Hazel could help with the watering, and with picking strawberries in the summer, and deciding what should go in which flower bed. That would help his husband to feel more included, surely. Surely.

It was just that, every time he tried to raise the issue with Crowley, they may get as far as Crowley admitting to mild spite. And then mysteriously the conversation would end up somewhere completely different, no matter how Aziraphale tried to keep the subject on Crowley’s feelings it would slip out of his hands like a, well. Like a wily slippery snake.

He didn’t want to pester Crowley into having a conversation he wasn’t ready to have, so reluctantly he waited. He wasn’t used to waiting. He was used to be waited _for_. He wondered if it had been like this for Crowley, but of course it hadn’t. Sitting around doubtful and heartsick as time dragged by, century by century on the chance Aziraphale might admit to liking him someday, now _that_ was patience.

But as the months stretched on and Crowley continued to pretend he didn’t feel like the second-favourite parent, frustration began to eat at Aziraphale. They didn’t _do_ this not-talking thing. Refusing to communicate was for human beings who didn’t know how little time they had, not two ancient beings who had spent six millennia becoming co-dependant.

It wasn’t even him, in the end, that broke the ice. Or rather, broke through the crust of the earth in a literal surge of loathing.

Hastur and Ligur were not, _shockingly_ , the only demons that harboured a seething hatred for their old colleague.

…

Aziraphale loved that Crowley was secretly gentle. Secretly sweet, generous, virtuous, and of course he wasn’t the only one that had noticed, but he’d hoped. Hoped that maybe the natural dynamic of office politics had prevented anyone from understanding Crowley the way he did. Hoped with shy affection that he was the only one who really intimately _knew_ Crowley.

But hope was for heaven. While Hell was willing to believe that Crowley instigated the Spanish Inquisition, they were also willing to believe that he went on a traumatized bender over it, because _somebody_ had to hold his hair back while he spewed a brewery into a latrine and Aziraphale was regrettably on the other side of the planet around that time.

He wasn’t the only demon that didn’t mean to fall. He just didn’t resent it in the mainstream fashion. He wasn’t the only demon that didn’t enjoy violence. He liked mayhem and mischief and pranks, and that (along with his general brilliance at project management and execution) was just enough to help him “get on in the business” as it were. In short, Aziraphale was not the only person that knew Crowley had … _good_ tendencies. He just didn’t ascribe those tendencies to too long spent living topside.

But since Armageddidn’t, Hell’s perspective of Crowley and his Tendencies had had a forced readjustment. If he wasn’t hellish enough to be vulnerable to holy water, then maybe he wasn’t a demon after all. After all, Hell’s understanding of what makes a demon would not permit things like Tenderness, or Kindness, or satan-forsaken Niceness to taint the definition. Those were weaknesses.

They weren’t holy water, but they were weaknesses.

Aziraphale and Crowley knew that they couldn’t hide Hazel forever. They had done whatever they could to shield her from sight, resorting to all the means of deception and even witchcraft they had to draw upon, but as Heaven and Hell each may personally attest, no plan is airtight.

And so it was that a demon emerged from the earth on the outskirts of Tadfield, bearing a knife glowing white-hot with hellfire smithed into its very blade, and a syringe full of holy water safely packed in a smash-proof case.

The alarms they had set for just such an unthinkable event began immediately to chime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some songs I listened to while writing this chapter:
> 
> Skinny Living: Let Me In  
> Alabama Shakes: Don’t Wanna Fight  
> Elise Legrow: Drinking in the Day  
> Grace van der Waal: You’re So Beautiful  
> Lhasa de sela: Love Came Here  
> Laura Marling: Soothing


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BOOM two chapters in one day. Tension is for dweebs. Also given the amount of writing done in one day there is an increased risk of errors, so same dealio - if you see a typo, lemme know.
> 
> Spoiler for those who need it: Hazel IS NOT the subject of the violence that takes place in this chapter. She gets threatened, but not injured.

Sleight-of-hand was fairly straightforward. Like riding a bike, once mastered it came naturally. Certain tricks requiring a palm or a steal only worked, in fact, if they were performed without effort.

Aziraphale had a tendency toward the theatric, but when his tricks didn’t work it was typically due more to their overworked fame than any clumsiness on his part. His penchant for elaborate misdirection could, under very specific circumstances, be exactly what a trick needed in order to land – and Crowley concentrated very much on that, as they watched the bewitched Bentley scream off down the street and around the corner.

Crowley and Aziraphale knelt at the high end of the back garden, Hazel held between them wrapped in a blanket. She had been napping when they were alerted to the demon swiftly approaching, and each of them prayed quietly in his own mind that she would stay asleep, at least until they could get to the safe house.

Mercifully, Oreamnos (Crowley would recognize that reek from a planet away, within a street it practically burned his nostrils) spun at the car’s escape and stealthily pursued it down the road, keeping to the hedgerows like a shadow.

‘Hurry,’ Aziraphale whispered. Lifting Hazel to his shoulder, Crowley kept to Aziraphale’s back as they crept in the direction of the garage. If they could get to the entrance to the tunnel they had dug underneath the trapdoor that looked like a large bucket, they would soon be coming out the exit of the tunnel they dug under the old cabin in the Krokskogan forest outside of Oslo, Norway. A major investment of time, effort and magic they had hoped never to have to use, but they were grateful for it now.

Of course, something any magician will tell you is that any audience member who has themselves mastered a few tricks is likely to want to show off.

Just as they entered the garage, Oreamnos’s patented stench hit them like a wave. They turned.

He was as tall as he was pungent. The coziness of the surroundings amplified his gruesomeness, like a scorpion in a crib.

Aziraphale blanched and clutched Crowley’s hand where it bunched at Hazel’s blankets. Any demon willing to hold an uncapped syringe full of holy water, only the thin membrane of glass between it and his fingers, was a desperate demon indeed.

‘Crowley,’ Oreamnos greeted with a grin of lipless teeth. Hazel stirred and immediately scrunched up her face. Crowley hurriedly covered her nose but it was too late. She fussed in her blankets.

‘Awww, what a pet,’ Oreamnos purred, spitting the word “pet” as if it meant something else. ‘Would you like me to quiet her down? I’m _excellent_ with kids.’ He twitched his arm up at the elbow and waggled the syringe.

‘Sit on it,’ Crowley hissed. Hazel began to whine. Aziraphale grabbed the shovel from the entrance to the garage and held with white-knuckled hands.

‘Oh, you may want to put that down,’ Oreamnos said. ‘Not very child-safe.’

He snapped his fingers.

It was obvious, they realized, that he still had the powers of Hell to draw from – they were cut off, and while each had his own in-born magic, they had been getting by on a very strict budget. Enough power had been expended on the tunnels that neither of them had used a single miracle that year, and all of that saved power had gone into the Bentley.

Devastation stalled them as they felt the blanket fall empty between them and Hazel appeared in her floral nightie in the crook of Oreamnos’s elbow.

‘Don’t you dare,’ Crowley growled, ‘don’t you _dare_ \--!’

His ex-colleague held up a knife in a prohibitive motion, in the same thick arm in which he held the confused Hazel. Her face was almost the same colour as her hair. All Crowley could think, petrified in the moment, was _her poor nose. She hates stinks_. _My poor baby._

‘Now, now, gents,’ Oreamnos said, leaning in and turning the knife in his hand so that the tip of it was inches from the top of Hazel’s head. ‘Let’s not make this painful. These are only insurance. The order is removal, only disposal if yous make it necessary.’

Aziraphale was not breathing beside Crowley. He was shivering violently, still clutching the shovel. Crowley’s mind raced.

‘No,’ he said.

‘A bit too much to hope for, m’afraid,’ Oreamnos said lightly. ‘You don’t get the Antichrist _and_ this disgrace. We don’t know what she’s capable of. Neither do upstairs, and we can’t have them getting ahold of her before we do.’ He tugged at a curl of red hair and Hazel kicked one leg in petulant toddling anger. ‘Think of it this way. She belongs with her own people, not playing at being human. She belongs with the rest of the abominations, _downstairs_.’

A lot of things happened in quick succession.

First of all, the baby-shaped entity in Oreamnos’s arm vanished. Shocked by the sudden loss of expected weight, Oreamnos was thrown for just a moment.

For a strained and furious demon like Crowley, that is, one that is both a father and a snake, just a moment is all it takes to plant a pair of fanged jaws on an enemy’s face. There was a crack as his sunglasses split and landed on the grass.

Never mind the holy water, which Aziraphale snatched from Oreamnos’s hand by bringing the shovel edge down on it with such force that the hand itself was removed. Never mind the knife, which was dropped as Crowley’s huge rope of a torso rapidly encircled the arm holding it and tightened, tightened, until it snapped.

Oreamnos roared and thrashed as Crowley struggled to trap his body within gigantic boa coils, all the while desperately thinking, _where is she. Where did she go_. In the instant he darted for Oreamnos’s face he had desperately believed that Aziraphale had magicked her to safety, but he just didn’t know. All he knew was that if he didn’t kill Oreamnos, this horrifying situation was going to get worse.

Aziraphale swung the shovel at the bleeding stub that had managed to get free from Crowley’s grip, and with a muffled and simultaneous snap, both it and Oreamnos’s neck were broken.

Crowley uncoiled rapidly. Aziraphale’s front was spattered dark, oozy red. Crowley rose and stood, feeling every bone in his body crick and shift. He stumbled as he tried to take a step.

‘Did you … _did_ you?’ he asked wildly. Aziraphale looked faint.

‘No. You didn’t?’

Crowley stared around. He dropped to his knees and started to crawl along, peering under the bushes. ‘Hazel?’

Aziraphale shrugged off his cardigan in a daze. He peered across the whole of the back garden. He dropped his cardigan to the grass and tucked his shirt back into his trousers where exertion had pulled it loose, too restless to know what to do with his hands.

Willing himself to calm, he replayed the last thirty seconds in his mind’s eye in as much detail as he could muster.

‘Crowley.’

‘ _Hazel??_ ’

‘Crowley. She vanished.’

Like a spring, Crowley rose on his knees.

‘She’s here somewhere.’

His staring yellow eyes and growling voice brooked no argument. His face was fierce. Aziraphale’s heart ached for him.

‘Yes, she is,’ Aziraphale said gently. He knelt down, and shuffled on his hands and knees to the geranium that had taken over the back fence. It led from the side of the garage all the way up to the back door behind Oreamnos’s discarded body.

From the shadows, a small red face peered out.

‘I’m sorry my poppet,’ Aziraphale cooed. ‘That must have been very, _very_ frightening.’

A neck appeared, dappled white and red. Then more neck, and her head rose from the mulch of dead leaves. A tiny pink forked tongue flickered out.

Aziraphale did not lift his gaze as Crowley’ shadow fell on his hands and filled the space by his side. A thump as he dropped down and bent forward. The petite red and white snake turned her attention to him, slithering from the leaves with her round noise pointed straight up, as if to ask if she was doing it right.

Crowley lowered his shaky hands to scoop her from the ground. Silently, he brushed a scrap of leaf litter from her scarlet back. Then he held her up, a little round bundle, and buried his face.

Aziraphale wrapped his arm around Crowley’s back and felt his body convulse. A hot tear fell from his chin to the earth, and another from Hazel’s scales.

‘My girl,’ came the hopeless sob. ‘Oh, _my girl_.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Uh, this got intense.
> 
> Oreamnos is a word for a type of goat. That’s it. That’s as far as I could stretch my imagination.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter that is basically just a conversation about fEeLiNgS.

‘You told me once that you were worried she might be like you,’ Aziraphale blurted over breakfast.

Crowley looked up from the bowl of porridge he was barely eating. Hazel wobbled on his lap as she leaned over to steal the mouthful on his spoon.

Neither of them had let her out of their sight in days. They rarely let her out of their sight to begin with, but she hadn’t slept in their room since she was a newborn. Now she slept in their bed, in the hastily aired-out cabin mattress, swaddled up against the chill. At any given moment in the night one of them was awake and watching.

She had not turned into a snake since she changed back on the evening of the kidnapping attempt. One moment Crowley had been holding a blanket full of serpent, the next he was holding a blanket full of baby. Aziraphale wondered if she needed to be scared in order to convert. He hoped not. She was such a sweet snake, and it would be terrible if her miraculous ability were associated forever with fear.

‘What?’ Crowley uttered. ‘Worried she might be like me? When was this?’

The caution in his voice went ignored by Aziraphale, who hounded on with husbandly determination.

‘Before she was born. You were worried, in your own words, that she might be like you.’

‘Obviously, she’s like both of us,’ Crowley said lightly. He pushed the bowl of porridge off to the side and shook out the Saturday paper with unnecessary emphasis. He had originally brought it for kindling when they decided to lay low and looked thoroughly unconvincing trying to read it. ‘Did you see what they’re planning on doing to Hogback Wood? The Them aren’t going to be too happy. Who builds apartments in a rinky-dink town in the middle of Nowhere, Oxfordshire anyway?’

‘Crowley,’ Aziraphale said.

‘Aziraphale,’ Crowley said with equal exasperation. Hazel stuck her hand in his mouth, having endeavoured and failed to find anything interesting in her own.

Aziraphale reached over with one of the tea towels they kept handy on the table and wiped the porridge that had dribbled from her lips.

‘I know you don’t always like having these talks, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Since last week, I mean.’

‘So I gathered,’ Crowley muttered, taking the tea towel from Aziraphale to wipe his own mouth and then Hazel’s hands. ‘I just don’t think it’s necessary. I mean, it’s not like nothing’s changed since she was born.’

‘Well yes, I know,’ Aziraphale conceded. ‘But you seemed so …’

Crowley watched with discomfort. He didn’t try to leave, which Aziraphale took as encouragement.

‘You just seemed so devastated. When we found her. And she was a snake.’

Crowley exhaled and looked away, everywhere around the room except at Aziraphale.

‘Look, I was exhausted. After everything. I was just having a moment, that’s all. I thought she’d … I thought something had happened to her. Of course I had a bit of a meltdown. So did you, which is why I seem to remember being the one to clean up after our bastard houseguest.’

Aziraphale’s eyes widened in warning at the word “bastard”. Hazel had only just started picking up word sounds, but he’d eat his books before he let her first actual proper word be a swear. He didn’t take the bait, however.

‘I am sorry you had the handle that yourself.’

‘Not a complaint, really,’ Crowley said, a little more softly. ‘I know you couldn’t help. Besides, you got half our stuff ready to go while handling her _and_ crying your eyes out, so it’s not like you were being lazy.’

Hazel stood up on Crowley’s legs and made grabby hands at the newspaper. Quickly she was tearing it to bits, and laughing at the sound as it rang out in the crisp, isolated winter air.

Aziraphale tried to bring the conversation back around. ‘I’m sure it was exhaustion, partly. What concerns me is that maybe it was also the condition she was in when we found her.’

‘You mean terrified out of her wits?’ Crowley cut in. ‘Or maybe the part where she wasn’t … whatever her version of discorporated is? Which, let’s face it, given she’s got no fixed destination to “return” to, probably means-’

‘Now _don’t_ say it,’ Aziraphale said firmly. ‘Don’t you use that to try and end the subject. It’s _quite_ unfair.’

Hazel was startled by Aziraphale’s tone and quickly looked up at him from where she was gnawing at the economics pages. He gave her a warm reassuring smile, but his gaze quickly returned to Crowley, who struggled still to meet his eyes.

‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ he said softly. ‘She’s a snake. She got that from me. And yeah, I was hoping she wouldn’t. Get things from me, I mean, like the eyes or the scales or any of it. I was hoping she’d be like a little you. Be smart and love things and not _draw attention_ to herself. The more like me she is, the more danger she’s in.’

Aziraphale was taken aback. He understood, or rather he understood what Crowley was trying to say, and it threw him. He didn’t agree with it, and he was relieved that it wasn’t wholly a matter of shame (though shame there was, seeping guiltily through the words). But there was a long-held and stubborn conviction that did not want to be questioned in Crowley’s voice.

‘My dear,’ he started.

‘Don’t,’ Crowley said, holding up a hand. ‘Please don’t do that. I love her just the way she is, but I don’t have to like what she’s got in common with me.’

Aziraphale huffed.

‘It’s rude to interrupt, you know.’

Crowley scoffed, raised his coffee mug to his lips and looked stubbornly out the window. Hazel got tired of the newspaper and made an attempt for the mug. Crowley’s free hand wrapped around her questing fingers and jiggled them.

Stretching his arm across the table’s distance between them, which suddenly seemed far too far away, Aziraphale wiped free a small remaining crumb of creamy oats from Hazel’s cheek. Then, impulsively, he grabbed Crowley’s hand.

Crowley cast him a warily inquisitive glance, but he didn’t pull his hand away. They held each other like that, across the table, and Aziraphale was struck by a memory, holding hands across a table at the Ritz. Why did the world have to keep trying to end?

Maybe it was to deliver them moments like this. A reminder to be grateful. As if they needed one.

‘Being like you saved her life.’

Crowley met his eyes properly, then. He opened his mouth. He closed it again.

Their little snake smacked her hand down on top of theirs like she was pressing a button for attention. When that failed, she vanished. Or rather, she transformed so instantaneously that her entire body collapsed into Crowley’s lap and she had to raise her very small head slowly and shakily on her stem of a body to perch her chin on the table.

‘Right on cue,’ Aziraphale chuckled. ‘I suppose she thinks we’ll fuss over her the most when she’s like this.’

Crowley stared helplessly down at her. Then he reached over to the teapot by Aziraphale’s elbow and wrestled the tea cosy off it.

‘She’s not wrong,’ he said, lifting her gently up and lowering her into the warm knitted monstrosity. ‘She’ll catch her death in this weather if she keeps slithering around with cold blood.’

A little nose appeared from the spout hole and tasted the air. Instinctively she quested onward to the lukewarm bowl of oatmeal.

Aziraphale took Crowley’s hand again and squeezed it. Crowley sighed.

‘You’re not going to let me be sad about it, are you?’

Aziraphale lifted Crowley’s cold hands to his lips and pressed a soft kiss to his knuckles.

‘No.’

Between them, Hazel slowly slid into the bowl of porridge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have kids but a bunch of my siblings and friends have kids, and lemme tell ya, what I have learned so far can be summed up as "they want to be dirty forever".
> 
> In response to Goddessa39’s question about what she looks like, she looks like a calico red mountain boa. Do a goog, be amaze.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm operating under the assumption that there are some typos in here. Once again, this will probably be edited tomorrow - if you spot anything let me know in the comments.

Moments in rainy bookshops notwithstanding, Aziraphale still wasn’t a poetry person. Sitting in an armchair with a cup of tea was nicer when he could concentrate on admiring a certain demon through the window as he menaced the shrubs in rolled-up shirtsleeves.

The land around the cabin was a dead expanse of white snow, and while Crowley had managed to encourage the hardier greenery, his relief at their return to the cottage was tangible. The first thing he’d done after they double-checked all of their traps and alerts had been to work on the garden. Not that it needed much. It barely looked worse for wear, bless the neighbour’s cat, who loved to dig up weeds and had almost definitely been recruited by Crowley when Aziraphale’s back was turned for the purpose.

Now, if Aziraphale _was_ to read in his armchair by the window, he preferred something substantial. A story he could bury himself in. Something that stayed more or less on topic throughout, instead of making him work for meaning that may or may not be there in a single contained word sculpture per page. Poetry was like a bowl of beer nuts; to be picked at absent-mindedly while one waited for a proper plate of steak and mashed potatoes and peas with rich onion gravy.

Mmm. Perhaps he should plan dinner. Hazel did so love mashy tatoes.

No, poetry was more Crowley’s speed. He could put the book down after three pages and go back to it four months later without having to remember where he left off. He could skip a handful of pages or read the thing backwards. Aziraphale brought a box of poetry when they first moved, just in case Crowley took up habitual reading the way Aziraphale had taken up habitual sleeping. He had not looked very closely even after Crowley arranged them (by _size_ and _colour_ , for _heaven’s sake_ ) on the shelf on his side of the bed with spider plants for bookends. Occasionally, he would find a slim paperback on the floor by the bath or in the pantry with a leaf for a bookmark. He would leave it where he found it and make a mental note of recurring themes so that he knew what to look for. Just in case he happened to walk into a second-hand bookshop and encounter the poetry section. No harm in taking notice. If Hazel was going to grow up to be a reader, after all, then encouraging Crowley could only help.

He had not given much thought to the fact that he only personally witnessed Crowley reading when Crowley read _to_ him. Those memories in his mind were shelved with fond snapshots of Crowley’s little gestures of trivial miracles, clean jackets, spared books and lifts home, every hand on his elbow and every door held open.

Perhaps, he thought, the appreciation was in the act itself of sharing. But surely that was wishful thinking.

…

‘The beggarly Bat, a cut-out, scattily begs at the lamp’s light, a lit moth-mote.’

The words skipped with impossible grace like a mountain goat on a steep hillside. Aziraphale stopped outside Hazel’s half open bedroom door with his hand still on the handle.

Crowley’s version of grace always appeared in the gaps where other people would normally trip. He walked like his body never quite understood legs, and he stuttered or made noises indicating he was constantly relearning how to talk. But he found his footing in all the potholes and hidden irregularities. Tongue twisters, Aziraphale strongly suspected, were one of his.

He listened quietly to Crowley slither over sentences designed to be stumbled over.

‘What wraps his shivers? Scraps of moon cloth snatched off cold rivers …’

The tableau was arresting. The pair sat on the rumpled toy mat, Crowley with his legs crossed and his arms encircling Hazel who was still in her pajamas. It was a weekend – Aziraphale couldn’t fault him. She probably wobbled over holding the book and that was that, he was done for. Getting dressed could wait.

Crowley’s chin rested atop Hazel’s unruly hair. He didn’t lift his head to watch Aziraphale nudge the door ever so slightly inward. His bare eyes flickered up, and his lip quirked, but his attention stayed on the book in his hands.

‘Scissored bits of the moon’s fashion crazes are his disguises and wrap up his fits, for the jittery bat’s determined to burst into day like the sun. But he never gets past the dawn’s black posts …’

Hazel looked up with bobbing curls as Aziraphale lowered himself into the bean bag by the window and interlaced his fingers on his shins. From where he was sitting, Aziraphale could see the picture of the bat illuminated before the perfect circle of the moon.

Crowley read on. Aziraphale wondered how much of the story Hazel comprehended and how much of her enjoyment was in the pictures, and the warmth of being nestled into a lap and the sound and vibration of her father’s voice. She understood the oddest things now that she was starting to talk. Aziraphale remembered reading somewhere that children of her age understand more words than they know how to speak. He suspected the same could be said of things other than words.

Did she understand that she was different? They had not agreed on whether to send her to preschool the following year. She still transformed, sometimes, once in front of Adam and twice during Anathema’s visits. Newt had fainted dead away and she had barely noticed, occupied as she was with hiding in Anathema’s curtain of dark hair. It would be altogether more serious if she were to turn into a snake at preschool.

They didn’t know yet, if Heaven knew. They didn’t know if Heaven would take Hell’s course of action, and they could not assume one way or the other. Killing Oreamnos had been enough to temporarily stay the hand of Hell, but it wasn’t as if Aziraphale could chase Gabriel off with a shovel.

Gabriel ran faster, for one thing, and he wouldn’t stick around to gloat. If Heaven decided to kidnap Hazel, they would do it swiftly and efficiently with a smile.

A small hand patted his knees and Aziraphale’s wandering mind returned to the present. Hazel stood with wide-eyed curious expectation. She rocked slightly on her feet. It seemed she had Aziraphale’s roundness and Crowley’s legs. It could have just been her age – toddlers generally walk with the tenuous solidity of a heavy barrel stacked atop freestanding pylons. They hoped that was it. The thought of her growing up to walk like Crowley made them both slightly uncomfortable.

‘Da,’ she said, raising both hands up to Aziraphale’s face, the universal language for “pick me up”. Aziraphale’s expression melted into a smile and he obeyed.

Crowley slid the book into the a-frame that held Hazel’s eclectic collection. It was fairly obvious which books had been brought into the room by which parent. _Snugglepot & Cuddlepie_ currently competed on the top shelf with _In a Dark Dark Room_ for the rank of Hazel’s favourite bedtime book.

‘Going to tell me what’s on your mind?’ Crowley murmured as he joined them by the door. Aziraphale lowered his face so that it was hidden nose down in Hazel’s curls, rose red in the cloudy morning and smelling faintly of pillows and blankets and something indescribably young and vulnerable.

‘Just nonsense fretting,’ Aziraphale said softly. He kept his face in Hazel’s hair as they wandered to the kitchen. Hazel wiggled happily. She didn’t always get to eat breakfast in her pajamas.

Crowley steered Aziraphale to a chair and went to put the kettle on.

The kitchen was painted in cream and pale teal and caught the morning sun. Crowley in his black singlet and black sleep pants always stood out like a shadow on a wall or a black spot on a white dog. _The beggarly Bat, a cut-out, scattily begs at the lamp’s light, a lit moth-mote_. But it was a soft morning and his hair was a mess, and he scratched the back of his head absently as he rested against the counter on asymmetrical hips and waited for the kettle to boil, and Aziraphale sighed and felt, and felt and felt.

The wave of tenderness must have been too loud for even Crowley to miss. Angels felt love like a sound or a colour, while demons were generally thought to be deaf and colour blind as it were. But Crowley had picked up a lot. He turned at the waist and looked over his shoulder at Aziraphale, maybe expecting a flustered averting of the eyes or a deep blush. Aziraphale simply beamed at him and bounced Hazel slightly so that she giggled and kicked.

Whatever it was, he must have felt it too, for Crowley was the one to blush as he turned back to the counter and started chopping an apple.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Aziraphale said haltingly. Crowley didn’t pause, but kept at his task with the mindlessness of a sleepy father making breakfast. It gave Aziraphale the comfort and space to continue. Crowley almost did pause as another blast of affection hit him from behind.

‘We really ought to identify our replacements. Neither upstairs nor downstairs would neglect leaving an agent on the ground. Not when it gives the opposition an automatic advantage.’

‘Assuming both of them still have a vested interest in controlling the earth and not destroying it,’ Crowley muttered. ‘But yeah, I see your point. _Oreo moss_ found out about us somehow and it may well have been word of mouth.’

The content of the conversation mercifully seemed to be going over Hazel’s head, though she picked up on the tone and frowned. She briskly tugged the collar of Aziraphale’s cotton shirt.

‘Apple,’ she said, or rather _appoo_ , but she was working on it.

‘ _Yes_ darling,’ Aziraphale crooned. ‘Apple and,’ he glanced up to Crowley, who held up a butter knife. ‘Toast. We’re going to have a delicious healthy breakfast.’

‘Crunchy,’ Hazel murmured excitedly.

‘Whoever told downstairs where we live is going to get crunchy,’ Crowley muttered, and vindictively turned five slices of buttered toast into soldiers.

Aziraphale briefly left her in her highchair as he fetched plates to set the table. In passing, he wrapped an arm around Crowley’s waist and leaned in for a deep kiss.

‘I adore you,’ he whispered in Crowley’s ear as he pulled away. Crowley’s eyes were wide and his smile subtle, as if he hadn’t realized he was smiling out loud.

‘What was that for?’

‘Just making sure you know,’ Aziraphale said casually. ‘The centre of my universe is here in Tadfield, in this room. Whatever decision they make up there, I’ve made mine.’

He turned away and laid the table with the plates and a dish of lemon butter. The air was hushed. Aziraphale thought once more of how loud life used to be in London. He thought it would be louder with a child, and sometimes it was, but the background hum was silent. A disarming reversal of what it used to be: a background of noise punctuated with bursts of silence.

A pair of arms wrapped around his waist. Aziraphale felt Crowley’s eyelashes flutter against the nape of his neck and his wiry arms tighten to be almost uncomfortable.

‘I need to sit down,’ he said, not fussing at all.

‘You can’t just land a declaration of love on me,’ Crowley said, littering kisses all over the bare skin available. ‘Just like that. Like you’re reading me a shopping list.’

‘I happen to find shopping lists very romantic,’ Aziraphale countered, and disentangled himself to sit beside Hazel who was licking the dish of lemon butter. ‘Shopping lists, and folding sheets together, and choosing paint swatches. I didn’t fall in love with you because of some grand gesture, or because you happen to be stunningly beautiful. It was all of the little things relentlessly adding up,’ he said, and took the dish from Hazel to put it out of reach. Then he placed his hands on Crowley’s sides and looked up. Some things need to be said face to face. ‘You buried me under an avalanche of small acts of affection, accumulated across endless centuries. I don’t know what you expected but frankly I’ll tell you how much I love you whenever and as often as I like.’

Crowley stuttered, stumbled over whatever he meant to say, then tilted his head to the side and gave up on words. He leaned in for another kiss, a peck really. It felt a little like their first kiss. Almost shy. Wrong-footed and unsure.

He shared out the apple slices and toast soldiers and fetched the blueberries and yoghurt from the fridge. He briefly left the room, and when he returned it was with Aziraphale’s slippers. Aziraphale didn’t realize he’d left them in the bedroom, but now that he thought of it, his toes were rather chilly.

Hazel babbled over her breakfast and some of the words were words. She could say most of what she was eating, what put Aziraphale in something of a daze. She was growing up so fast. It seemed just yesterday she was a squirmy pink potato.

Crowley held Aziraphale’s hand under the table so tightly his fingers almost hurt. With his other hand he alternated between drinking black coffee and reading. Aziraphale thought he recognized the book. It made him smile.

‘Read to us?’ he asked.

Crowley looked at him. He turned back a page. He sniffed, not quite a laugh. Then he cleared his throat.

‘I to my perils of cheat and charmer came clad in armor by stars benign …’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bat poem is from What is the Truth? by Ted Hughes. Technically a poetry collection for children, but a lot of Hughes’s writing for children feels adultish. The plot of What is the Truth? is that God and God’s Son travel to earth so that God’s Son can ask human beings for the truth about animals. One of the poems is a shepherd telling off God for giving so many diseases to lambs.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Longest chapter so far! And true to fashion, most of it is conversations.
> 
> All chapters up to this point have received minor edits, but this one hasn't. Same as yooj, comment if you spot a typo. Or just to say hi. I love reading comments, but i'm usually too shy to reply.

It was a little optimistic, one had to admit, hoping that heaven would mind their own damn business. That prudence would dictate permanent detachment, and if they had to notice, for God’s sake, if they had to _watch_ , let it be from an aloof distance.

It wasn’t like he had left the bookshop unattended. He couldn’t, no more than Crowley could let the garden go to seed. They had their cottage, but their relationship was no different from the human sort in that they also had each their _own_ space, and Aziraphale’s was the bookshop. Had always been, even when he hosted their clandestine meetings.

And he had had to leave it another’s hands while he and Crowley retired to Tadfield with their newborn. He had brought over 200 books with him for comfort. But he never sold the shop. His corner of Soho would not be relinquished so easily. Aziraphale was not prone to sin, per se, but avarice was one of the few and it was a big’un.

Anyway. Anathema seemed such a trustworthy girl, and so bright. And while she didn’t exactly need financial support while staying in the country, she wasn’t the type to sit on her hands.

Aziraphale’s opinion of his staff only improved when she informed him promptly that either she was imagining an aura the size and density of a raincloud in the shop, or an angel had just walked in the door.

‘I can’t leave her to handle it alone,’ Aziraphale agonized. The surreptitious text had arrived in Crowley’s phone, as having a wall-mounted phone was modern enough for Aziraphale and just borrowing Crowley’s smartphone sometimes was vexing enough, thank you Very much.

‘She’s capable,’ Crowley said. ‘And they don’t care about her. They care about getting their hands on _us_.’

There was no question of who the “us” referred to. Hazel danced a toddling boogie at the far end of the living room to the Wiggles on the telly. She looked so blissfully unaware and small that Aziraphale very nearly gave in.

But, no.

‘You’re right, they don’t care about her,’ Aziraphale said. ‘I don’t know what Heaven cares about anymore, but I know they don’t value human life at all.’

Crowley made a sound of protest.

‘She is in my employ, my dear. I am responsible.’

Crowley could withstand a lot of things. Aziraphale’s sincere eyes were not on the list.

So, wearing his favourite coat with sigils woven in white and red into the lining, secure in the knowledge that Crowley and Hazel were on their way to the cabin, Aziraphale mustered the power they hoarded for these incidents and miracled himself to the bookshop.

…

 He wasn’t sure what he had expected. Something other than comfortable silence, perhaps.

Despite himself, Aziraphale’s soul was soothed by the fragrance of old books and old furniture and the faint eternal permeating aroma of London that city-dwellers only notice when it is gone. His bookshop. His old home.

He stood where he had landed in the back room and took a brief moment to get his bearings. Self-consciously he straightened his shirt and vest. _Get it together_. He was a Principality. And now, a Husband and Father and an Employer who would most definitely Not Stand for the Bullying of those engaged by him to protect his books.

Thus galvanized, Aziraphale opened the door.

Anathema stood with a small stack of books in her hand, shelving them at a leisurely pace. She glanced at him and meaningfully turned her gaze to a gentleman standing in the centre of the room browsing through a table of art books.

Aziraphale allowed his relief to radiate through a warm smile. Anathema smiled, like a granddaughter to an endearing old grandpa. Or maybe that was just how she smiled. A result of her upbringing perhaps. One could never tell.

Either way, she was right as rain. Priority one: check.

Making certain first that no other humans were present to witness whatever the hell was going to happen, Aziraphale stepped into the shop.

‘Can I help you?’

The gentlemen looked up at the loud, firm greeting delivered by the man in beige and tartan.

He was not exactly Aziraphale’s antithesis – not remotely similar, either, in his pale jeans and old sweater under a dark grey overcoat, and his thoroughly scuffed penny loafers. The hat drooping from his hand, the entire outfit in fact, looked as if he had found it in a thrift shop.

He didn’t have the unfriendly, standoffish air that Crowley claimed all angels (“all _other_ angels, love”) tended to carry themselves with. He looked how Aziraphale had always thought angels ought to look – thoroughly approachable.

The look came complete with a beatific smile. Whoever this was, he was doing an excellent job of pretending he was happy to see Aziraphale.

So, this was their approach. Get him to lower his guard. Well, he wasn’t buying it.

‘Ah,’ the fellow started, in a first-year-at-Oxford voice, hesitant and affable. ‘Please forgive me barging in. I would have, well, _rung the doorbell_ personally,’ he looked at Anathema apologetically, then back at Aziraphale, ‘but I suspected you wouldn’t answer.’

‘Are you suggesting that you alarmed my staff to trick me out here?’ Aziraphale said frostily.

‘I wouldn’t say I was alarmed,’ Anathema said, before the interloper hurriedly interrupted.

‘Oh no, it was never my intention to antagonize. I just wanted to get your attention. Frightfully clever to give the vanguard to a witch, but naturally she would have to alert you if she encountered here anyone from our side or your ... eh hem, spouse’s. I was banking on your reputation that you would show up in person.’

Aziraphale grew angrier with every word. It was all the worse that this … _angel_ , this fop dressed up like a present day BBC adaptation Dickensian mendicant, was still holding one of his books open in his hands (a Banksy, so perhaps it was Anathema’s, he really couldn’t begrudge her starting her own little collection), but he had put Anathema to such bother and he was being so bloody casual about it.

‘And what, pray tell, _is_ my reputation?’ Aziraphale asked, injecting a healthy dose of menace into every word.

‘That you consider yourself humanity’s protector,’ the man answered readily.

Aziraphale puffed up like a parrot being pestered by a raven.

‘I assumed, rightly it appears, that this counts doubly for any human to whom you would entrust your private domain.’

Anathema gave a small shrug as if to say _he has a point_. Then she picked up a paper bag with “egg salad sandwich <3” written in Newt’s handwriting, whispered ‘Lunch break?’ and, at Aziraphale’s hasty nod, dashed out the door on tiptoe. The angel waved cheerfully to her as she passed.

Aziraphale deflated.

‘Fine then,’ he admitted through gritted teeth. ‘Here I am. Your ploy was successful. I suppose a squad has been sent to do Heaven’s dirty work now that I am successfully distracted? Well, they will fail. You ought to have learned, we’re not so easily dispatched as that.’

Even on his dignity, keeping his voice level, Aziraphale felt something deep inside him tremble. His husband and his baby were too far away. He had utter faith in Crowley. But God … he’d believe they were safe when he was holding them again.

The angel in loafers leaned back slightly. He recovered quickly, but the surprise, for a moment at least, shone through.

‘I won’t pretend ignorance of what took place last time you were at head office,’ he said. ‘I know also that your tie to Heaven is well and truly severed. I would not be here as their go-between if it weren’t. But, for my own part,’ he said, and stepped carefully up to Aziraphale, placing the book he held down on a table, ‘angel or otherwise, you are my predecessor.’

Aziraphale peered at the angel, seeking the merest trace of dishonesty. Angels were typically terrible liars. Either this one was an exception, or his naturally innocent-looking face belied all evidence of deception.

It couldn’t hurt to chat, Aziraphale supposed. He wouldn’t trust the fellow as far as he could throw him and he never was very strong at shot-put. The slightest suspicion his family were in danger, and he was out of there. But in the meantime, well. It never hurt to be polite.

‘So. You’re my understudy,’ Aziraphale said. ‘What did you do to get lumped with my old job? Step on Sandalphon’s robes?’

The angel tilted his head to the side. ‘I was not, as you say, lumped with your old job. There was a line.’

Aziraphale smiled sardonically. ‘Really?’ He chuckled.

The angel frowned. He looked more familiarly like an angel like this somehow, thought Aziraphale with regret. He had never met an angel that was not often annoyed and disappointed, even under the veil of serenity, like a parent with a child they didn’t want.

‘Yes,’ the angel said solemnly. ‘I had to plead my case, in fact. I had to plead,’ he said conspiratorially, ‘with Gabriel.’

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows. Then, unable to help himself, he laughed.

The angel smiled, but it was a soft and sad thing.

‘I confess, that amazes me,’ Aziraphale said through a chortle.

‘I don’t see why it should,’ the angel said. ‘Unless you really do believe that you are the only angel in all of heaven who loves this place.’

Aziraphale stopped laughing.

‘Not _this_ place, necessarily,’ the angel said, waving his arm to suggest the book shop, ‘but the earth. Its oceans and its seasons. Its architecture.’

‘Very pretty words,’ Aziraphale said suspiciously.

The angel had the gall to look offended.

‘Oh, please,’ Aziraphale said sharply. ‘One minute you’re all lined up to destroy the earth, the next you’re queueing to live here? Pardon, but I’m not convinced.’

He turned, mind half made up to returned to the back room and beat a hasty retreat to the cottage. He’d be exhausted and vulnerable for a while, but there was always the cabin.

A hand on his arm stayed him. He wished he’d thought to bring something. A shovel maybe.

‘Earth is a terrible place,’ the angel murmured. ‘It is. But even humans love terrible things. What kind of angels cannot love when a human can?’

Aziraphale squared himself and pinned the interloper with a glare he hoped fully communicated Shovel.

‘You _will not_ bring Crowley into this.’

‘I am not,’ the angel said, expression radiating saintly innocence.

‘What you are saying might sound perfectly nice to someone who doesn’t know many angels, but it won’t fool me.’

The angel stared unassertively at Aziraphale for a while. He picked up the Banksy hardcover that he had put down and flicked it open, not looking at the pages. Anyone looking in the window at that moment would have seen simply two men, discussing a coffee table book.

‘You don’t feel you’ve been given reason to believe angels love the earth,’ he said redundantly. ‘You may be right. You were, after all, the _only one_ willing to disobey with all of Heaven to witness.’

There was a time when that word would have mortified Aziraphale. It would have cowed him and made him feel tarnished and dirty, worthless. Angels were created to serve. To be disobedient was unthinkable.

And he wasn’t the only one who ever felt so shamed, he was sure. But now he had a daughter, and she disobeyed him every day. And he loved her so much it hurt.

The angel handed him the book, and as Aziraphale reflexively took it, the angel gently closed the page on his thumb. Aziraphale met his eyes, puzzled, feeling as if some exchange had just taken place and he had no idea what it was.

The angel put on his hat and walked to the front door. As he opened it, he paused, and tilted his hat politely in Aziraphale’s direction. Then, without another word, he was gone.

Aziraphale opened the Banksy book. His thumb rested at the top of a quote.

 

_The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages._

 

 Anathema found him sitting in the back room in his old armchair, the Banksy book laying closed on his lap.

‘What do you think?’ she asked. Aziraphale looked up suddenly, as if he hadn’t heard her enter.

‘Sorry my dear?’

‘What do you think?’ she asked again, gesturing to the book with her glasses. Aziraphale looked from her to the book.

‘Ah,’ he said quietly. Then, again, ‘Ah.’

He stood and handed her the book.

‘Fascinating,’ he said.

They stood awkwardly for a few minutes.

‘Was … everything okay?’ Anathema asked. Aziraphale took a deep breath and let it out, tucking his thumbs into his front pockets.

‘Truthfully, I don’t know,’ Aziraphale said. ‘I don’t want to get my hopes up.’

‘But there are hopes? To be gotten up?’ Anathema asked craftily. Aziraphale chuckled. Then his face fell.

‘I just realized,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even get that gentleman’s name.’

‘Oh,’ Anathema said absently. ‘Well. Doesn’t matter. Hopes aside, this’ll get your spirits up.’

She handed him a bag. Aziraphale took it and pulled out a Tupperware container full of homemade minestrone and a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it and was struck by a neon blast of crayon scribble so bright it hovered almost an inch off the page.

‘Hazel wanted to show you the picture she drew of Dog,’ Anathema explained. ‘Crowley says you’re not to come home until you’ve pottered to your heart’s content, unless you’re in mortal peril, in which case you’re to come home immediately.’ She patted Aziraphale on the back. ‘He also told me to tell you the shovel’s by the back door. Whatever that means. Is it a secret code?’

Aziraphale took Anathema’s hand. She smiled again, that obliging granddaughter smile. It was enough to make an old angel feel awfully paternal.

‘You checked on them?’

‘Obviously,’ Anathema said. _Obviously_. Then, easy as you like, she went back out into the shop and picked up where she had left off shelving books.

Aziraphale sat down with the container of minestrone in his lap, clutching Hazel’s picture to his chest, probably getting little crayon flecks on his shirtfront. It mattered not.

He wondered, daring to hope just a little, how he had ever felt alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look me in the eye and tell me Anathema doesn’t know Banksy's identity.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Un-edited. Again.

Adam was learning about war.

It shouldn’t have been odd. It shouldn’t have been odd because it was in the school syllabus, war making up a hefty chunk of human history. Crowley had spotted Adam’s history teacher at his favourite lurking café reading Susan Sontag’s _Regarding the Pain of Others_ like a primer. It shouldn’t have been odd, because Adam was a child and deserved to have an ordinary run-of-the-mill childhood.

The more Crowley thought about it, the angrier he got. It was one of the worst kinds of anger, the kind that couldn’t have anything done about it. The kind of anger that invites things like Wrath and other cardinal sins that Crowley really, really didn’t want to attract the attention of.

He’d have thought he had long since come to terms with the framework within which he operated. Heaven, Hell, the whole hypocrisy. But now that he had broken free of it, it was like seeing a cult from the outside for the first time. He had walked among humans for so long. Now that he was generally operating like one, it was mind-boggling why anybody would willingly subscribe to religion. If it was psychologically possible, Crowley would have given atheism a red-hot go just on principle.

Aziraphale had relayed his encounter with Heaven’s new agent when Crowley arrived to drive him home, and they had talked about it long into the night. It was the kind of conversation they mutually agreed to avoid back when they were on opposite sides. Probing interrogations of the destructive nature of absolute obedience, the ultimate worth of mere gestures measured up against purposefully mindless devotion, the dilemma of how “free” free will really is when one is allowed to know nothing. The kind of conversation that skirts very, very near to a screaming match. They were foes for a lot longer than they’d been married.

But, the “foes” had always had a very big “technically” in front of it. They were well accustomed to mutual accommodation. The awkward gory mess that resulted from trying to mash morals into theology was, itself, a kind of dance, and who didn’t tread on his partner’s toes now and then?

‘Even assuming this one angel personally believes that defying a divine plan is okay sometimes, he’s probably thinking it was all really God’s idea and _therefore_ it’s okay. And if that’s the case, then your choice to defy orders was meaningless. It’s a workaround to let them maintain that yeah, defiance _is still_ bad because you _only_ got away with it _because_ it was part of God’s plan.’

‘First of all, get your feet off the coffee table. And second of all, we have no idea what narrative Heaven is using to keep the celestial host in line. In all likelihood, my permanent Earthly residence coupled with my removal from Heaven’s roster is being presented as a kind of banishment. Nobody outside of God herself can expel angels from angelhood, but just because I haven’t Fallen doesn’t mean they can’t spin it to make me an example, capital E.’

Crowley walked his toes down the leg of the coffee table and grunted. He took a sip from his tea, grimaced, and added another generous shot of vodka to it before tasting it again and nodding in approval.

‘Granted. But you have to admit, an angel telling you non-verbally that he secretly agrees it’s not cool to blindly follow orders when orders say to bomb innocents, I mean, that’s a low bar. Subterranean, even.’

‘I didn’t say he was a revolutionary. But I repeat, he _is_ the first angel I can remember ever indicating such sympathies to me.’

‘Pretty weak indication,’ Crowley said into his vodka tea.

‘For an angel, it was bold,’ Aziraphale said doggedly. ‘You remember how skittish I used to be. Still am,’ he admitted. ‘It’s very difficult to extend sympathy to a fallen comrade when your full and total worth, the meaning of your existence, is determined by how unquestioningly you submit.’

Crowley took a deep breath and let it out slowly, staring at Aziraphale as he did. It was a concentrated gaze, contemplative and substantial, and Aziraphale squirmed beneath it.

‘It never felt like a cult when I was one of them,’ Aziraphale said quietly.

Crowley wondered if, perhaps, Aziraphale had been thinking the same things as he all along. He ventured an idea he had hoped Aziraphale would raise first.

‘If he’s an ally, I don’t want to take that away from you. But … and especially in light of what you just said … we can’t dismiss the likelihood of a long con.’

Aziraphale twiddled his fingers around his mug of cocoa and looked into it despondently. He looked like such a lost child in the moment that Crowley could not help but join him on his side of the couch, nudging him forward to sit behind him. He downed the rest of his drink and savoured the burn as Aziraphale snuggled readily into his chest.

‘They could be hoping she’s a second Antichrist,’ Crowley said, still unsure if this was the right time to discuss it. But no other time had felt right either, and they needed to put a voice to it sooner or later. ‘Half demon, half angel, raised by rebels. Maybe they think if an angel could ingratiate themselves into our circle, they can influence her.’

‘Like us with Warlock? Seems rather sloppy planning to steal our idea.’

‘They aren’t exactly brilliant at coming up with their own,’ Crowley said. But he was uncertain. It was a little donkey-brained, even for the heavenly host.

‘Look. I don’t want to just give this bloke our trust. Not without making him earn it.’

‘And what does earning our trust look like?’ Aziraphale asked tartly.

‘I don’t know,’ Crowley said truthfully. ‘Maybe let’s wait until we know who got my job. Plot from there.’

Even the back of Aziraphale’s head betrayed his feelings of uncertainty. Crowley pulled him back into the couch and stroked his fluffy west-highland-terrier hair back from his temples.

Physical intimacy would never not be fresh, exciting, brilliantly new. It struck in the oddest moments. _He never would have let me hold him like this, before_ , Crowley thought, and it derailed his thoughts altogether for several long seconds. The pressure of Aziraphale’s body resting against his, so that every breath pressed them closer together for a beat. His ribcage between the couch cushions and Aziraphale’s comfortable weight pressing him into his seat. The play on the inside of his thigh, of his own pulse against Aziraphale’s side. He wondered if Aziraphale could feel it.

‘Are you afraid, my dear?’ Aziraphale whispered. Crowley’s brain sputtered back to the conversation.

‘Of what?’

‘Finding out who got your job. The possibilities,’ Aziraphale asked. His voice, so tender. Crowley could feel him speaking.

‘Not right now,’ Crowley answered. He threaded his fingers through Aziraphale’s hair and fiddled with a button with his free hand, not concerned with whose button it was. ‘Right now I’m afraid of nothing.’

It wasn’t entirely true, exactly. He was mortally terrified of losing his family. He was worried about Adam. He was worried about the dahlias, and the geranium really needed to be cut back.

But in that transient bubble of their bodies clasped together by gravity and mutual adoration, in that small space beyond the activity of the mind and the external world, there was no space for fear. So, in a way, he was telling the truth.

…

Adam dropped by on Sunday afternoon with his school workbook. He had never really needed help with homework, but also never troubled to do it at home. Home was for relaxing and playing and reading. Projects including paper mache and paper towel rolls and pipe cleaners had to be done at home, of course. For maths, history and literacy however, the pleasanter location was Aziraphale’s dining table, loaded up with lemon slice and tea and biscuits. It used to be the local library or his friend’s houses, and they were wonderful locations for getting distracted. At Mr Fell’s house, with Mrs Young’s initially tentative but eventually grateful permission, Adam could knock out a week’s worth of homework in a single afternoon.

(Mrs Young was a little less sure about Mr Crowley, and she could never quite wrap her head around calling one’s husband by his surname, especially when the pair didn’t share a surname, but she supposed they were very modern and, after all, every couple has their quirks.)

Crowley did not observe any notable reaction from Aziraphale to Adam’s history homework. There was a slight cooling perhaps when the subject of war arose, but as Adam shared his thoughts using the word strictly in its attributive noun form, Aziraphale took to the conversation with more animated interest. He relayed his personal tale of the Crusades, and Adam listened with rapt attention.

Hazel discovered a mud puddle and Crowley took the opportunity to send her and himself to the bathroom. Adam and the subject of war upset him too much, and too ambiguously, for him to conceal the discomfort for long. He had never been able to gracefully leave a room when he was upset. With a toddler to bathe, he could at least cover over the feeling.

And there he stayed, sitting on the floor beside the bathtub while Hazel shed a layer of dirt in four inches of warm bubbly water.

‘Tack me doo doo doo green green green, manuma num mean mean meeeann!!’ Hazel cheeped atonally, splashing a litre of water onto the floor for emphasis. Crowley wiped a stack of bubbles off his forearm and handed Hazel a plastic dinosaur.

‘It’s not that I don’t think he should learn about violence,’ he said, making sure not to let his voice carry. He always seemed to be able to hear Aziraphale singing in the shower from anywhere in the house, and had long-held suspicions about the acoustics of old cottages. ‘In a controlled environment. I mean he’s at that age where children begin to glimpse the world beyond childhood. Really sense the scale of it. And that’s just it, he’s already got a sense of the scale, doesn’t he? He’s encompassed the sheer scope of it, turned it inside out and put it all back together again. And he’s not even hit puberty yet.’

‘Gottaaa ack ack, nana ack nack nack!’ Hazel belted. Crowley gently wrestled the brontosaurus from her mouth and looked for one she was less likely to choke on. He hesitated offering her a velociraptor. Too pointy. A stegosaurus? At least she had already chewed all the sharp points off the stegosaurus.

‘The more I think about it, the worse it is,’ Crowley said plaintively, and held the velociraptor up so Hazel could bash it with the stegosaurus. ‘He’s so young. How could anyone think handing a weapon to a child is the right thing to do under any circumstances? Let alone turning a child _into_ a weapon.’

‘Nagon addack!!’ Hazel yelled, and flung the stegosaurus. It hit the shower curtain with a muffled _fumf_ and clattered to the tiles.

‘The one thing heaven and hell could have a consensus on, and it’s child soldiers. Or a child general, I suppose. Giving such massive perspective to a very young ill-equipped person and saying here, here’s the world and everything in it, everything you’ve never had a chance to experience. Now _wreck it_.’

He rubbed his thumbs behind Hazel’s ears to remove the last of the mud and lifted a cup of warm water over her head to rinse away the suds. Her skull felt tiny and fragile in his hands.

‘How do we keep them away from you, pumpkin?’ he asked tenderly. Hazel looked up at him with her unnatural blue eyes. ‘How do we let you be normal?’

She handed him a velociraptor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will be incredibly impressed if anyone picks up which of Queen's songs Hazel is butchering.


End file.
